About me…

I’m Mike Bryant, the original “Mike the Boilerman”. I’ve been using this trading name since 2004 when a customer of mine suggested it to me! 

I repair boilers for a living and I don’t install. Consequently I don’t have the conflict of interest of many plumbers - repair your boiler breakdown for £hundreds or try to sell you a new boiler for £thousands? I’ll repair yours if possible which is nearly always, without trying to sell you a new one.

I have been a Registered Gas Installer since 2002, initially with CORGI then subsequently with Gas Safe Register when they replaced CORGI as the nominated Registration Body. My registration number is 197499. 

I have also been a member of the Chartered Institute of Plumbing and Heating Engineers (previously the Institute of Plumbers) since 1982, registration number 009909L. 

I live in the village of Bedwyn near Hungerford, west Berkshire. I have many close links with Reading, Berkshire from when I lived there, including many customers in the area. 

History and background:

I have been in the building industry most of my life although I started off as mechanical and electrical engineer. I abandoned my office career at the age of 25 in favour of working with my hands. I come from a family of skilled craftsmen - my grandfather for example was a traditional wooden boatbuilder who made violins for a hobby. I have four children who have all grown up and left home now.

I started my own plumbing business in my mid 20s and have been self-employed continuously since then. In the late 1980s I set up a bathroom shop where we designed and fitted luxury bathrooms working out of a showroom in Chobham, Surrey. I sold my share of the business to my business partner after seven or eight years having learned I prefer working with my hands rather than running a larger business with several employees. 

I then traded for many years in the same business (bathroom design and installation) as a sole trader designing and actually fitting the bathrooms myself, before finding my knees were suffering from the physical work and the constant stair-climbing in particular. So I stopped fitting bathrooms and decided to specialise in central heating boiler repair and maintenance. 

I’ve been repairing and servicing gas boilers to the exclusion of everything else for 20+ years now and it love this type of work, finding I have a natural talent for homing in on the reasons why a boiler (or anything else) doesn’t work. These days I specialise in the very well-made older boilers from the 80s, 90s and early 20s, the type of boiler younger engineers tend to condemn as needing replacement as too old to repair. Often not the case. 

About this site:

miketheboilerman.com was never conceived as a selling site, although these days it seems to produce most of my work. I started it when it became clear lots of my customers had many questions and little idea about how heating systems worked. I found myself explaining similar points about how central heating works over and again to different customers, so I started writing pages for this site explaining in some detail detail each point or subject I found myself discussing, and it’s all grown from there. 

I also publish and maintain a number of websites for individual makes/models of boiler, going into detail about the common faults that occur in each, and how to fix them.